New Lenovo AMD Laptops With Pluton Co-Processor Reportedly Only Boot Windows By Default

[kylew77]

The article title is a little click bait in my opinion. You still have to disable secure boot for all *BSD operating systems and some Linux distros. Now if they did this AND forced secure boot then you would have a problem on your hands. This just makes it harder for the average user to install Linux on their computer. Still something to be concerned about but not the end of the world the title would make it seem.

[wagner17]

No. SecureBoot is enabled by default on most motherboards, but they can still boot Linux or other OS's with the proper signature. This is (bad) news.

I would want confirmation from Lenovo because on May 26 during the Fedora 36 release party video Mark Pearson said that Lenovo is still working on Linux enablement for the Z series. See https://youtu.be/3weDwYFAFco?t=968

[Rabiator]

I would want confirmation from Lenovo because on May 26 during the Fedora 36 release party video Mark Pearson said that Lenovo is still working on Linux enablement for the Z series. See https://youtu.be/3weDwYFAFco?t=968

I guess we will get confirmation or not next week, when Michael actually gets a Lenovo laptop to try out.
Personally, I'm more interested in Linux benchmarks for the Rembrandt iGPU. So far I've only read some results from benchmarks under Windows.

[deusexmachina]

We gotta get Project X and frame.work working together so we can have a corebooted AMD laptop that is customer-friendly, modular, and repairable! I realize AMD & Intel are both against us, but how are you going to get good integrated graphics in a laptop otherwise without losing a bunch of performance due to software patches from Intel CPU exploits? Plus, the AMDs support ECC natively - so all we'd need is the right motherboard.

[Terr-E]

Personally, I'm more interested in Linux benchmarks for the Rembrandt iGPU. So far I've only read some results from benchmarks under Windows.

This !
I am very curious how SteamOS would perform on a Ryzen 9 6980HX.
Give me a nice miniPC chassis and I'd have my Xbox-killer. But I realize that I am probably the only one who'd buy that.

[lejeczek]

Heh... I said on many occasions that Lenovo was a joke! but might be a new low. I do not believe these are honest mistakes - it's clear to me that Lenovo are, have been for a while, a behemoth whose management completely have no bearings in the industry, do not understand the industry - they are only good at what they are good at - running factory lines.

[wagner17]

Heh... I said on many occasions that Lenovo was a joke! but might be a new low. I do not believe these are honest mistakes - it's clear to me that Lenovo are, have been for a while, a behemoth whose management completely have no bearings in the industry, do not understand the industry - they are only good at what they are good at - running factory lines.

See https://psref.lenovo.com/Product/Thi...Gen_1?tab=spec

[meklu]

My work laptop, a Lenovo ThinkPad T14 with an Intel CPU, had to have all of its "security" "features" disabled before it would let me install Fedora 35 on it. This was back in January of this year. I have no idea how long it's been this way.

[skeevy420]

The article title is a little click bait in my opinion. You still have to disable secure boot for all *BSD operating systems and some Linux distros. Now if they did this AND forced secure boot then you would have a problem on your hands. This just makes it harder for the average user to install Linux on their computer. Still something to be concerned about but not the end of the world the title would make it seem.

Finally, a bit of reason.

This means that given the default firmware configuration, nothing other than Windows will boot. It also means that you won't be able to boot from any third-party external peripherals that are plugged in via Thunderbolt.

To me that doesn't seem that bad at all. Combined with a UEFI password, an attacker or thief won't be able to run a Live distribution and run their tools to gain access to the disk. They'll have to physically remove the disk and do their work from another PC which adds a whole layer of fun thanks to TPM/hardware based encryption.

This doesn't really change anything for the average user. For the past 10 years or so doing UEFI tweaks for SecureBoot and whatnot were common things for OS installs. Anyone who has installed an OS knows to check the for things like that. Anyone who reads the documentation before installing an OS will learn to check for that.

It's not like it's a forced thing like pregnancy in America. Kind of hard to be all that outraged over yet another proprietary option when the Linux option is tappy tap tap away.

[Michael]

I guess we will get confirmation or not next week, when Michael actually gets a Lenovo laptop to try out.
Personally, I'm more interested in Linux benchmarks for the Rembrandt iGPU. So far I've only read some results from benchmarks under Windows.

Will have plenty of CPU and iGPU tests...